Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Saturday I went to a performance on campus by the Alice Coltrane Quartet. It was cool. It's a jazz quartet, with Alice Coltrane (wife of John Coltrane) on piano and organ, Ravi Coltrane (son) on saxophone, and two guys on drums and bass. I don't know much about jazz, but I really enjoyed the music. There were a lot of solos that were entertaining and crazy impressive. Especially the drum solos, considering the drummer was 81 years old. Also, after intermission, they introduced two U of M students who had won scholarships from the John Coltrane Foundation. The students came up on stage and played a piece with the band; they had their own solos and everything. Pretty cool.

I now have a laptop. My advisor got a new one and gave me his old one. It's 5 or 6 years old so it's not exactly the latest and greatest. Actually, it pretty much sucks. But I should be able to find some use for it.

I also have an iPod nano. I bought a 2GB one because they had them on sale at school for $99. It's the older generation nano, not the new one that came out a couple of weeks ago. The iPod is cool, but I've found it to be pretty annoying trying to get songs onto it from Linux -- the iTunes-like program that people seem to recommend, gtkpod, crashes a lot and otherwise acts retarded.

It's the last week of regular-season baseball. The Dodgers are 1 game behind the Padres in the NL West and 1 ahead of the Phillies in the wild card. It's going down to the wire...

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

This will probably be a long update since a lot has happened since last time. I've got a lot of pictures this time.

First of all, my internship at IBM ended back in mid-August. So, sadly, I had to move out of the place I was living over the summer where the landlady cooked for me. I drove my car back to Michigan (made pretty good time, probably about 9 hours of actual drive time) and caught a flight from there to LA.

Next was Katie and Kevin's wedding:

They had a Chinese banquet. Yum.

What else did I do in LA... well I did get to ride my motorcycle, but not as much as I would have liked. I did buy a new helmet; my old helmet started off pretty ratty, and has been getting rattier over the years. What a huge difference... the new helmet has "new helmet smell" (kinda like new-car smell), and the face shield is way clearer than the old one which was all scratched and yellowed.

I helped my sister go used car shopping. She was looking for a Golf, so we test drove one of those, and also drove a Scion tC. While we were at the VW dealer I got to drive a new GTI, which was a lot of fun. It has a more powerful engine than my Maxima, plus it weighs less, so it definitely has a lot of punch to it. Eventually my sister bought an '04 Golf. It seems to fit her pretty well.

Went to the Getty museum for the first time. The outside of the place is so nice, with fountains and gardens and views of LA, that you don't really want to go inside and look at the art.

I spent a few days in San Diego with Jenny, which was fun... went to a Padres-Dodgers game at Petco Park (which the Dodgers lost, unfortunately). We also went paragliding at Torrey Pines, which was a lot of fun:

That's me (and my instructor) hanging from the parachute-like wing on the left of that picture.

We also went to Catalina Island for a day, which was pretty fun. This is the town of Avalon:

We went on this tour of the island which was cool, and it was on this restored 1950's-era tourbus:

We also did the glass bottom boat tour:

In LA we also visited some other places (Redondo Beach, Citywalk) and had lunches and dinners with lots of people. Good times.

So finally on August 31 I came back to Ann Arbor. For a couple of weeks my room got really messy, because I had just moved back and hadn't bothered unpacking yet. Plus I bought computer parts to build a new computer, so that added to the clutter. Check out these pictures. The left pictures are when I cleaned my room before the summer to take pictures for potential subletters, and the right pictures are how my room looked a week or two ago. It's a little better now; at least I can walk around without stepping on things.

Speaking of the new computer, Nate gave me a P4-2.8Ghz processor he had laying around. So I bought a motherboard, RAM, power supply, and new TV card. So now instead of a 6-year-old computer, I have maybe a 1 or 2-year old computer. Not bad.

I've also been doing some car stuff since I got back. Changed my oil, replaced the rear O2 sensor, and replaced the left rear brake rotor. I also got new rims and tires. Check out the before and after pics:

Big improvement, huh? Next step is springs and struts... my current struts are pretty much blown, and if I'm going to replace those, I figure I may as well get new springs too.

A couple of weekends ago I went to a demolition derby. Basically you throw a bunch of cars into a ring, and they crash into each other until only one is still operational. Pretty fun to watch. It's surprising how much damage the cars can take and still keep running. I mean, by the end, they're running on four flat tires and their trunks have been totally flattened, but they keep running... at least until they break an axle, or the engine catches fire (which happened a couple of times), or something. Here's a photo, which I stole from Ya-Yunn:

What else have I been up to... well, I started taking beginner tennis lessons through the city rec program. I've had two lessons so far; they were kind of basic, but I suppose it's good to learn the basics. I've been playing more tennis outside of the lessons too, although that's going to taper off soon because the weather is getting worse. Damn seasons. =)

You know what is kind of funny? The photo I have on my home page (the one with my jacket on my head sort of like a cape) is apparently pretty popular. Two or three times now I have met someone new, and when they found out who I was, they said "oh! you're the one with that funny picture on your home page." Guess it's good to have a memorable picture.